Features Chief Information Officer

As Abe Alirez was growing up, he dreamt of driving a truck—hauling loads of freight that help keep the economy going while seeing the U.S. along its highways and byways. Alirez also loved technology. He wasn’t old enough to drive a truck, but he was old—and skilled enough—to repair his friends’ video game systems. For […]

Jeff Scheetz likes to joke that he moved from his native Colorado to Avondale, Arizona, to escape the snow. He’s done that, although it also means he left some of his favorite fishing streams behind when he became chief information officer for the city of 89,334 that’s on the western boundary of Phoenix. However, Scheetz […]

Onward it goes, the migration of on-premise case management systems to the more secure yet still accessible cloud. Time was when it might have been met with dissent by the people who administer Michigan’s Macomb County, but as Chief Information Officer Jako van Blerk assures, the process proceeds according to plan and with the support […]

Ashtabula County, Ohio, sits on the shores of Lake Erie, all 720 square miles of it dotted with quaint towns and picturesque greenery. It’s known for its wine country, covered bridges and—if you ask Rockford Benson—the down-to-earth friendliness of its 97,000 people. Benson is a native son who came home to serve his neighbors. He’s […]

How it helps to know the nuances of a profession before transitioning to a supportive role. So says Sarah Slipetz who spent the early years of her career as a registered nurse, getting a clogs-on-the-floor look at how inefficiencies were built into almost any healthcare system. Her colleagues and patients deserved better, she says. “I’ll […]

Denise Figueroa had to look up Oklahoma on a map when she applied to work for the state’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services in 2021. When she got the call for an interview, she asked twice about where they were calling from because she hadn’t expected a response. Then, when she got the job […]

As festivals go, this one won’t conjure up memories of Woodstock, Live Aid or Coachella. No one gets inundated by storms causing seas of mud, no rock stars take jets to play multiple venues in a day, and the setting is south central Virginia, not the California desert. But John Collins has very high hopes […]

One chilly morning in January 2020, Tony Neumann got the call every IT director dreads. Some strange splash screens—also known as boot or welcome screens—were popping up on devices given to employees of the City of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where Neumann has worked since 1999. Before long, staffers couldn’t use their devices. Neumann tried to remote […]

Having spent over a decade in cybersecurity, Nicholas Schopperth has pretty much seen it all. But when one hacker went after the direct deposit information of his colleague at Dayton Children’s Hospital, the mild-mannered Air Force veteran got mad. “I don’t like when people bully my people,” Schopperth says. “So, I called the bank, because […]

When the Jane Phillips Sorority Credit Union was founded in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1939, members could open savings accounts with a quarter and borrow up to $50 in an unsecured loan. Back then, Treasurer Mildred Hunt handled credit union business at her desk at Phillips Petroleum Co. at lunch or after hours, too. Times have […]